Prologue
“Yeah... Yeah, I’m doing well. We’re getting by just fine. Well, Hikari’s... Nah, never mind.”
Ayase Kaito dried his hair with a towel as he spoke with his father on the phone. Both of his parents had been working overseas for quite a long time. He only saw them two or three times a year when they came back to visit during their vacations. Leaving their children in Japan to fend for themselves must’ve been a major source of worry for them, and they called incessantly to check up on Kaito and his sister as a result.
Thanks in part to their calls, Kaito never felt especially lonely. His parents made sure to send them plenty of money to take care of their daily expenses—more than they needed, really—and his sister was almost too responsible, which certainly helped as well. Even though they’d been left on their own, their lifestyle never felt uncomfortable in the slightest.
However, at that moment, Kaito was hiding something from his parents. Something about his all-too-responsible little sister, Ayase Hikari.
From his perspective, Hikari was outstanding in just about every area. Her academic and athletic abilities were well above average, she was both cheerful and diligent, and she was popular to boot. She always made sure to help out with the household chores even before their parents moved away, and that experience ended up being a major boon after they started living independently.
In spite of all that, though, she hadn’t gone to school for almost an entire week. She wouldn’t explain why either—not even to Kaito. At first he’d thought it might be something hard to share with a boy, family or not, but she was just as unwilling to open up to their mutual friend, Kotou Tsumugi.
She wouldn’t go to school, but she wasn’t acting like a complete shut-in. She’d leave her room and walk around the house like everything was perfectly normal. She even left the house on occasion. Her truancy aside, she was acting the same as ever.
Actually, no. Not quite... Kaito rested his chin in his hand as he considered her recent behavior. She might’ve been acting slightly strangely after all, in retrospect. For one thing, she’d sink into absentminded thought a lot more often than she used to, only to suddenly blush, shake her head, and bury her face in a pillow a moment later. She’d jump whenever her phone buzzed, look at the screen, then slump her shoulders with disappointment—but sometimes, she’d smile and hum happily instead. She’d been behaving in all sorts of strange ways that Kaito had never seen from her before.
He hadn’t the faintest clue what could be causing it. Or perhaps it’d be better to say that he couldn’t have had the faintest idea. Hikari was embroiled in an emotion that Kaito himself had never experienced.
“Kaito, are you there? What’s wrong?”
“Ah, it’s nothing.” He’d been so preoccupied thinking about Hikari’s condition, he’d frozen up entirely. His father’s questioning voice finally snapped him back to reality. “Uhh, what were we talking about? Hikari, right?” He lowered the phone and shouted. “Heeey, Hikari! Dad’s on the phone!”
He knew she was upstairs and intended to pass the phone to her. Strangely enough, though, she didn’t reply. This was far from the first time he’d called her down for a phone call; she never ignored him. He climbed up the staircase and knocked on her door. Not only did she not respond, he also couldn’t hear any noise coming from her room at all.
“Hikari? I’m coming in!” He slowly cracked the door open. The lights were off, so he couldn’t see much, but he could just barely hear the soft, steady sound of her breathing. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he finally noticed her. She was lying on her bed in her pajamas, fast asleep. “Hikari? Huh, weird. She almost never goes to sleep this early...” he mused. “Oh, dad? I guess she already fell asleep... Yeah, maybe next time... Right, sounds good.”
He certainly couldn’t bring himself to wake her up just for a phone call. He stepped out of her room—then stopped in his tracks. Something felt slightly, subtly off. But when he turned around and glanced back into her room, nothing seemed out of place—not that he knew her room well enough to know if anything was particularly different.
“Oh, that’s it... The window’s open,” he muttered as he finally noticed her curtains wafting in the gentle breeze. Hikari’s room had a window that looked out onto the house’s second-floor balcony, and it had been left open. That would be what had caught his attention. “That girl, I swear. I keep telling her she can just turn the AC on... Oh, sorry, dad, don’t worry about it.”
Kaito turned his attention back to the phone as he closed the window and switched on the air conditioner. He took a moment to make sure it was working properly, then left Hikari’s room for good.
At no point did Kaito notice that he was standing just outside on the balcony.
❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤
“Hoooly crap...”
I, Kunugi Kou, let out the breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding and whispered to myself in relief. I seriously thought the jig was up when Kaito came over to the window, but in the end, he shut it without noticing me at all.
Everything about that whole adventure had been way too close. Carrying Ayase to her house without alerting their neighbors, climbing up to her balcony, infiltrating her room, and returning her to her bed was bad enough already, but just as I’d pulled that off, I heard Kaito call for her. I seriously thought I was about to have a heart attack.
Oh wait, crap, her shoes... Screw it, guess I’m keeping ’em for now. I wasn’t about to make my way down into their entryway to put them back. That’d be way too risky, and I’d end up back here before too long, one way or another. I just had to stealthily put them back where they belong when I had the chance.
In any case, I was absolutely exhausted. I was so tired I didn’t even want to put in the effort to get off the balcony, but unfortunately, I didn’t really have a choice. If I’d let myself pass out there, I’d almost certainly get discovered the next morning and be forever branded as the creeper who snuck up onto his best friend’s sister’s balcony in the dead of night. That’d make my best friend’s opinion of me drop down to a subterranean level in an instant, and even worse, Ayase Hikari would once again be made aware of my existence.
I tottered to my feet and leapt from the balcony to the wall that surrounded their plot of land, then from the wall to the ground, keeping as quiet as I could possibly manage.
Or, well, I tried to do all that. In reality, I pretty much flopped straight from the balcony to the ground in a heap. That made just a bit of noise, but a few moments passed and none of their neighbors came out to take a look, so I figured I was probably safe.
In one sense, anyway. I gasped and wheezed—it felt like I could barely breathe at all. It was like my whole body was on fire, and my head in particular hurt so much I was worried my brain might actually be melting. Tuckering myself out by carrying Ayase was certainly part of the problem, but I knew the odds were high that it was far from the full picture.
In all likelihood, using my magic when I didn’t have the mana necessary was what had put me in that state. I’d basically squeezed water from a stone. From a standards-of-modern-society perspective, of course, that entire train of thought was absurd—magic doesn’t exist outside of fiction and fairy tales! Except, unfortunately, it does if you’re me. It’s one of the very few skills I actually have. I don’t have a whimsical animal companion that rides around on my shoulder and gives me advice, and I definitely don’t run into walls in train stations with an owl and a suitcase in tow, but magic? That, I can do.
By my own assessment, though, the best way to describe myself would be a background character. If I had to assign myself a distinguishing trait, it would be my association with my bosom buddy Ayase Kaito: a genuine rom-com protagonist who saw fit to bless this joyless modern society with his presence. I’m a background extra who doubles as his best friend—in short, I’m his best friend sidekick! Dunno if that title makes sense to anyone else, but I like it, at least.
“Ugggh...” My heart skipped a beat, possibly to punish me for going off on a happy-go-lucky mental tangent. The pain grew so intense for a moment that I crouched over, clutching my chest. I was sweating like a pig.
A long time ago, the boy I had called my best friend before I met Kaito taught me about magic. He explained that “using magic when you’re out of mana’s like putting an empty kettle on the fire.” If there’s nothing in the kettle for the fire to boil, then the kettle itself ends up scorched. It seemed quite likely that I was in precisely that state: I’d forced my body to put out magical power that it didn’t actually have, and that power left me charred and burned as a result.
I’d cast my magic on Hikari. To be clear, I can’t stylishly manifest bursts of flame from thin air nor conjure up a magical breeze to flip girls’ skirts. I’d used the one form of magic actually available to me: a spell to manipulate memories. It put her to sleep and robbed her of all the memories she had of me. By the time she wakes up, she’ll be the same ol’ Hikari that she was before we met. And, by association, she’ll also forget the strange, traumatic experience of being assaulted by that crazy old exhibitionist.
None of that would change the fact that all of those things had actually happened to her, of course, but there’s a reason why I made sure we only talked in person or via phone call. As long as I deleted my entries from her phone’s address book and call logs, there’d be no danger of a “wait, who’s this person in my phone?! I don’t remember adding him!” situation, and no stray text messages for me to potentially miss. Thanks to recent advances in phone technology, I just had to press her finger up to the phone’s sensor and it was unlocked, easy-peasy.
“’Course,” I muttered to myself, “the sidekick excuse is getting pretty far-fetched at this point...” It felt like the moment I allowed myself to accept that fact, I’d lose the ability to lie to myself about it. It might’ve already been too late at that point.
I refuse to allow myself to become a protagonist. I have absolutely no intention of ever stepping into another leading role. I’ll never cause anyone else to suffer.
Never again.
